The Lightstep

by John Dickinson

  Her pen wavered, and she put it down. Then she picked it up again, frowning. There would be someone. Someone stood concealed, in the heart of that great diffuse conspiracy that had killed him. She needed only to think a little.

  Perhaps it should go to Paris. She should address the so-called 'Directory' who were the masters of France at least in name. But how, if so, was she to reach them? There would be no post yet, working across the Rhine. And she could hardly dispatch one of the servants to ride all the way to Paris – even if she was the only one in the house left in their right mind.

  In the end she wrote a single line upon the envelope. 'To M. the General Hoche, Commander of the French Army at Wetzlar.'

  Let their creature in Germany receive her blame, for France and all its works. It was enough. And Wetzlar was only twenty leagues away, in Nassau, this side of the Rhine. It was much more likely to get there safely. She did not know the proper form for addressing a general of a republic that neither the Emperor nor her father recognized. However, she thought, the man himself probably did not know it either.

  'You must introduce me to your Michel,' said the younger Maria, as she lifted her candle in the final, graceful movement of the dance.

  On the settee the ghost stirred.

  'Introduce you?' it murmured. 'Perhaps. But will you love him or hate him? I cannot predict.'

  PART III:

  THE FEARFUL CITY

  June–October 1797

  VI

  The Gallant in

  Mourning

  A man walked down the main Saint Simeon Street in the walled city of Erzberg. His name was Karl von Uhnen, and he was the son of an Imperial Knight.

  The first and most important truth about the Uhnens, known to all those who were aware of such things, was that the Knight's grandfather had entered into a misalliance. Moved by nothing more than love, he had married a woman of no pedigree. And he had bequeathed the consequences to his house. Now the Uhnen family shield bore only twelve quarterings, rather than a full sixteen. And although the Knight had wealth and wit and influence, although he had secured posts for himself at the Prince-Bishop's court and a commission in the Prince-Bishop's hussars for his son, nevertheless certain doors in Erzberg and the Empire – canonries, and positions in exclusive church foundations, would remain closed to him and his family for at least another generation.

  For that reason, the Knight had said to his son, it was all the more necessary that one should conduct oneself at all times in a manner fitting to the blood. And Karl von Uhnen did, to the best of his ability.

  He was a handsome young man, with liquid brown eyes. His usual expression was thoughtful and almost melancholy, as if he were trying to compose a poem and had got stuck half-way through. He had looked exactly like this the day he had had to sit at the head of his troop under French cannon fire, and had seen twenty of his men and horses killed in a quarter of an hour. He had looked the same, only perhaps a little more melancholy, as the ravages of campaigning had put holes in his boots, lice in his hair, and had ripped his immaculately-tailored uniforms to rags. At each return to Erzberg he had righted all deficiencies as swiftly as he could. Now, a month after the peace, he was again dressed in crisp white uniform and an extravagantly braided tunic, with his green jacket, lined with black fur, slung just so from his shoulder. He had even managed to grow his hair back long enough to tie it into a queue at the neck and into the elaborate braids that hung before each ear, which were a mark of the hussars in peace and which every hussar had cut off while in the field to help keep themselves free of vermin.

  He was acting against orders. He was showing his uniform in town on a day 'when every man in the Prince's little army was supposed to be keeping indoors. The mob was out – a paid mob, hired by the Canon Rother-Konisrat, the head of the peace party in Erzberg. Yesterday they had chased and stoned two infantry officers who had tried to approach the Saint Christopher Chapel. They had pursued a baron of the war party across the New Bridge, and pulled two of his footmen off his coach, beaten them and thrown them into the river. And in the night a man had been mistaken for someone else by drunken vigilantes, and had been knifed to death in a gutter.

  The mood in the town had swung heavily against the army as the scale of the losses at Hersheim had filtered through. Citizens who might have shrugged their shoulders at the death of a few mercenaries or sad émigrés had also lost sons. Apprentices who had once gaped at smart white uniforms had lost all respect. Now jeers and mocking songs sounded outside barrack walls. The army, fuming, stayed behind barred doors. And Captain Karl von Uhnen of the hussars walked in the streets, with his plumed cap on his head and his uniform plain to see.

  He was not a stupid man. He knew there might be trouble. He had even left his valet behind, preferring to run an extra risk himself rather than bring his servant into danger. But his motives felt compelling, and he thought that he could handle it.

  Mob or no mob, he calculated, his best chance of reaching the Saint Christopher Chapel was to make his approach as boldly as possible. He would march quickly (but not too quickly) down the Saint Simeon street, confident under the eyes that fell on him, and be past them before they could wonder what exactly he had to be confident about. His hand rested lightly on the hilt of his sword. His boots clumped purposefully on the cobbles, accompanied by the jingle of his brightly polished spurs. So far, it was going well.

  He had reckoned without the crowds. It was a feast day – of which there were many in Erzberg's calendar. The guilds had closed their workshops. Journeymen who had followed their holy relics in procession that morning now swarmed around tables set out in the streets. They had tuned their fiddles, knocked the bungs off kegs and were beginning their celebrations. Even the broad Saint Simeon was thronged and difficult to pass. Von Uhnen came to a halt in a little square outside a guild chapel. The far exit was completely blocked by gangs of festive Ironworkers. Short of shouldering his way through (which he supposed would be unwise as well as undignified), there was no way forward. He hesitated, uncertain what to do.

  Men were already looking his way. In a moment they would start to think about him. Haughtily, he lifted his eyes to the rooftops as if none of it was any of his business. At that moment a step sounded behind him. A hand caught his arm.

  'Take your hat off,' a voice hissed.

  'What?'

  Beside him on the cobbles stood Wéry – bare-headed, and swathed in a greatcoat on this mild day. He was glaring at Uhnen.

  'Take the thing off!' he said urgently. 'Hide that damned plume!'

  He was too late. In a doorway a man, a fat, well-to-do shopkeeper of some sort, broke off from speaking with his neighbour. For a moment he glared at the hussars. Then he hissed.

  More heads turned.

  'This way,' Wéry grunted, jerking his head at the nearest alley. 'Don't run.'

  'What?'

  Von Uhnen stood scowling in the open, and everyone was looking at them.

  'This way!' Wéry turned on his heel to lead the stranded aristocrat off down a narrow, foul-smelling street. Von Uhnen hurried after him, with the awkward strut of one who must make more haste than dignity should allow.

  Wéry checked his shoulder. They had not been followed. Not yet. Round a corner . . . He caught Uhnen by the sleeve again.

  'Now run!'

  His urgency seized the other man and drove them along together. Encumbered with their swords and uniforms, they stumbled along in the tight maze of medieval streets and filthy little courtyards where the river men and journeymen and apprentices of the city lived. The alleys were so narrow that their boots splashed in the open sewers that ran down the middle of them. The mean buildings of the Riverside Quarter stooped over them like huge old widows in shabby clothes. They passed the dark doorways and windows. Don't look in! Wéry thought. They were no safer here than they had been in the crowds. Stray cats stared at them and flitted from their path. The walls rang with unseen voices, calling and singing and already the worse
for drink. There were shouts behind them. Was that a mob forming?

  Run!

  A mob could whip itself up in minutes. Wéry had seen it in Paris. There had been days, then, when sewers like this had run with blood.

  (God, yes! An evening of September mist, with a chill in the air that brought out the smells; the lanterns and braziers around a big-walled prison, and a rumour of a crowd inside; and women laughing on the street corner while at their feet the sewer had flowed red-brown in the yellow lamplight with the blood of hundreds of murdered men and women, mingled with the filth of the city!)

  He had seen it. And what they did to the corpses! They broke out into a cobbled square of tall, stepped-gable buildings, all painted in bright colours and decorated with friezes. There was a fountain here, raised on steps, and an air of quiet and prosperity, as fragile as a bubble. Just a score of paces away, down another narrow street, they could glimpse the teeming Saint Simeon again. There was no sound of pursuit.

  The two men struggled to catch their breath, glaring at one another.

  'What are you doing here?' said Uhnen, panting.

  'The same as you,' said Wéry curtly. 'But I know how to do it.'

  'Do you? Then you may oblige me by doing it somewhere else.'

  Von Uhnen was not one of Wéry's regular persecutors in the regiment. Normally he would just have ignored the upstart foreigner who had been so bafflingly favoured by the Prince. If the hussars, and all the rest of the world, were going to ruin, that only made it the more important to conduct oneself according to the standards of one's station.

  But now he had been accosted by this same upstart and manhandled in the streets. He had been dragged off through the alleys without a shred of poise or dignity. And he was not ready to admit that it had been necessary to get his beautifully-polished boots covered with sewer-filth. He glanced disdainfully down Wéry's coat and uniform, showing with his eyes that he knew they had come from a tailor more accustomed to fitting infantrymen than hussars, that they had been purchased on Albrecht von Adelsheim's credit, and that neither Adelsheim nor Wéry had yet managed to repay the full amount. And, what was more, there was a patch on one elbow, yet Wéry had no other uniform more presentable than this.

  In Uhnen's eyes, of course, this final offence was far the most heinous.

  Wéry, for his part, had been planning to make his way carefully and unobtrusively down from the hussar barracks to the waterside, with his plumed hussar's cap under his arm and his coat around him. Now he had put himself into harm's way for a dandified, ungrateful aristocrat who would have deserved the beating or lynching that would have been his in a minute if he had not been rescued there and then.

  And why was Uhnen out? Couldn't the brainless son of a horse have stayed indoors as he had been told?

  They looked at each other, wordless and furious.

  Von Uhnen was about to turn away when something else occurred to him.

  'It was you who went to the Adelsheim house, wasn't it?'

  'Yes,' said Wéry. And thought: What's it to you?

  'I heard about that. It was not proper.'

  'You mean I should have waited until somebody else remembered?'

  'I'd have done it.'

  'Then why didn't you?'

  Von Uhnen looked at him, coldly. 'It's none of your concern.'

  'I suppose not. And I suppose how – or whether – you get to the Saint Christopher Chapel is none of my concern either?'

  'No, it's not.'

  Von Uhnen turned his head and peered down the short alley to the Saint Simeon street. People were moving up and down over there, clattering, calling, cheerfully carrying on with their festivities. No mob was after them today.

  'I'll tell you, all the same,' said Wéry, as the gallant hesitated. 'You won't get to the Saint Christopher at all. No one in uniform will.'

  No one in uniform would reach the Saint Christopher chapel. For in the chapel, in a lead-lined coffin that was surrounded by candles and heavy incense, lay the month-old remains of Albrecht von Adelsheim. At the plea of Lady Adelsheim, the Canon Rother-Konisrat had sent his men to gather his young cousin from the battlefield and bring him up the Vater to his home. And before the dead man reached his last resting-place, they had laid him in the Saint Christopher Chapel near the city waterside, so that the great and good of Erzberg might come to acknowledge the price of war. But no army officer, or any of the war party less than the Prince himself, was being permitted to approach the coffin. For it was in the Canon's script that they should be ashamed to show their faces while the coffin lay in their town. And his cudgels were out for any that did.

  Von Uhnen watched the crowds passing in the Saint Simeon. A man's voice was singing, loudly and laden with drink. The song was a bawdy one. There was no threat in the words (to a man, at least). All the same . . .

  'What were you going to do then?' he said at last.

  'Come with me,' said Wéry, with a certain grim satisfaction, 'and I'll show you.'

  VII

  The Count in the

  Coffee House

  The Vater flowed from north to south through Erzberg. On the eastern bank lay the medieval city, clustered around the cathedral on its low rise. On the western, lifted above the town on a high hill, stood the citadel and the Celesterburg palace. City and citadel were linked by the Old Bridge, which plodded out across the river on ancient piers of stone, bearing the traffic of the Saint Simeon on its narrow back. A hundred and fifty yards downstream the New Bridge crossed in bolder arches to serve the modern Saint Emil quarter, where the houses of the rich clustered under the shadow of the citadel.

  Wéry and Uhnen hurried across the New Bridge together. To their right, beyond the Old Bridge, they could glimpse the Saint Christopher Chapel and the small square before its doors. There were figures there – loitering, it seemed, with no purpose at all in the summer evening. Some appeared to hold sticks or cudgels, which they carried with a nonchalant air as if they were gentlemen at croquet. It was late afternoon, and the square was in shadow. The clothes of the watchers looked as dark as funeral colours under the gilding sky.

  The two officers crossed to a cobbled wharf. Here, standing among the broad fronts of the Saint Emil quarter, was the Coffee House Stocke, a solid, square building with elaborate wall-paintings, lights in its windows and a raucous babble indoors.

  Wéry liked the Stocke. He liked it because of the people who came here – merchants and tradesmen, craftsmen and entertainers: outflows from the Saint Emil, the Celesterburg, the wharfs and workshops across the water. He liked to think the battered notice at the doorpost declaring 'All men equal under this roof a true revolutionary sentiment, and not merely a reaction to the strict hierarchies of the city guilds. There were pamphlets and papers scattered on the tables; and even though their editors all complied slavishly with the requirements of the Prince's censors, there were often items of interest to be found in them. And while most of the nobility (including Uhnen – to judge by his reaction as they entered) preferred to drink and play in the ordered calm of their clubs, it was occasionally possible to see some thick-skinned son of an Imperial Knight here, smoking his clay pipe within a yard of a bargee who was doing the same.

  The Stocke reeked, of course. But what of that?

  Inside, the air fumed with tobacco smoke. The roof-beams were so low that both men had to stoop. The chatter was so loud that the woman who took their fee had to shout her banal greetings at them. Men were getting up, sidling between the tables and the wooden partitions, going out or sitting down again. A party of musicians were arguing over a score and making notes in the margins. Another group, barge-captains perhaps, were playing at cards. Over the low fire hung the coffee-pot, and before it were clay jugs, clay pipes, a bookshelf and an unlaced boot. There was a bible on the bookshelf, and also a row of locked frames containing drops and powdered medicines advertised to cure diseases of the skin, toothache, cough and pox. There was a tiny carved wooden shrine, painted in bright bl
ue and gold, with the face of the Virgin smiling gently into the room.

  'Hey, Wéry!' called a voice through the din. 'Over here!'

  From beyond the farthest of the wooden partitions an arm waved – a flash of white uniform. Wéry made his way through the babble, balancing two mugs of coffee and stooping as he went. Three faces watched him as he approached. The one who had waved them over was Heiss, a Captain in the Dürwald battalion and aide to the army commander, Field Marshal Count Balcke-Horneswerden. He was a small, slightly-built little cockerel of a man, with bristling grey hair and moustaches and popping, bloodshot eyes, who grinned as they came up.

  'How the devil are you, man? I thought you'd never make it! God damn! Who's this? Von Uhnen?What the hell are you doing here?'

  'I . . .' began Uhnen. And he stopped.

  He had seen who else was seated at the table.

  Massive in the space between bench and table, like an elephant crammed into a pigsty, was Balcke-Horneswerden himself. He was a fat-chested giant, with bulging cheeks and a heavy jaw. He had removed his wig, which was on the table beside his coffee. His high, shaved head narrowed at the crown like the point of a pear. His eyes were black and his face red from the warmth of the room. He glowered at the newcomers as if they were late on parade, and poorly turned out at that.

  This was the senior field officer of the small Erzberg army, a Knight himself, and a drinking companion of the Prince. The court of Erzberg, which delighted in wit and classical allusions, nicknamed him 'The Colossus', because of his great size and because a French cannon-ball had left one of his legs forever planted in the soil on the west bank of the Rhine. But to his men, from the lesser colonels down to the cursing infantrymen, he was 'Old Blinkers', who looked neither right nor left but went straight up the middle.

  And the man beside him . . .

  Adhelmar Fernhausen-Loos was a young, wan-looking aristocrat with lazy eyes. A thin smile draped itself across his face as he lifted one hand in greeting to Uhnen. Yes, it's me, his expression seemed to say. Droll, isn't it?